NIETZSCHE & CIORAN IN POSTMODERNITY - KERSTIN BORCHHARDT

We hosted a live talk with Kerstin Borchhardt, a professor at Siegen University, Germany, about Nietzsche and Cioran as postmodern thinkers or, more properly, as antimodern thinkers who cannot be inequivocally deemed "conservative," let alone "reactionary," inasmuch as their nihilism amounts to a radical and tragic affirmation of man's godless freedom as well as the responsibility or fault for his own historic fate.

Both Nietzsche and Cioran are radically “modern”, “postmodern”, “metamodern” or “hypermodern” thinkers whose works invite us to delve into our fragile postmetaphysical condition and make the best out of it, instead of denying it. They are not dogmatic and doctrinary thinkers, unlike the majority of philosophers since Plato. Their generosity, often inseparable from cruelty, consists in sending us back to ourselves empty-handed (ne te quaesiveris extra). Reason why they are often denied the title of “philosophers” (Cioran even more than Nietzsche).

After the “death of God”, and with the assistance of theses Masters of Suspicion, Western man starts to awaken from his “dogmatic slumber”, from his metaphysical necessity of an abolute. They show us how it is possible—and supremely difficult—to live “sin fundamentación” [without foundation], as Cioran told two Spanish students, doing away with the need for a necessary being that granted existence a metaphysical foundation (“Being”, “God”, and their lower surrogates).

Kerstin Borchhardt is a German Philosopher and Art Historian, with a PhD in Art History from Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, where she was granted scholarships from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. She taught at the University of Erfurt from 2013 to 2014. From 2014 to 2019, worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Leipzig. In 2019, she did a research stay in Mexico City, where she participated in the Encuentro Internacional Cioran: entre Filosofía y Literatura, with a conference revolving around the assimilation of Nietzsche’s philosophy by Emil Cioran.

She collaborated with several artistic and scientific projects. She is the author of several publications, such as Böcklins Bestiarium: Mischwesen in der modernen Malerei (Berlin, Reimer, 2017), Germinal Monsters and New Kinships in Contemporary Art (in: ARKEN Bulletin, Vol. 8, Special Issue, From a Grain of Dust to the Cosmos), Rethinking Positions of the Human Through Art, edited by Anne Kølbæk Iversen and Gry Hedin (ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark, 2020), From Mental Experiments to Material Presence: Expanded Ecotopias Between Nature, Science and Spirituality, Contemporary Art (2020). Among her most recent publications, there is an important article on Cioran and Nietzsche’s historical-philosophical connections: “On the Power of Frustration: Cioran’s Nietzsche Reception in his Syllogisms of Bitterness” (Anale Seria Drept, Universitatea “Tibiscus” din Timișoara, 2020) . Currently, Kerstin Borchhardt teaches at Universität Siegen, in Germany.

#nietzsche #cioran #postmodernism